Last night at Humberto’s she told her special story. “When I was born, nobody saw anything striking and they thought I was a girl,” says Hendrickx.
At the age of five, the doctors thought she had a hernia and she was taken to hospital. “Then it turned out that I had testes.” Watch the whole conversation here:
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Hendrickx has the so-called androgeenongevoeligheidssyndroom. This makes her biologically a man, but her body is insensitive to the male hormone.
Due to the presence of the female hormone, her body has developed into a woman. For years she was told, “It’s better if you don’t talk to anyone about this.”
Self image
“It’s hard to say what a secret like that does to you,” Hendrickx explains. During her adolescence she developed a ‘very strange’ self-image. “There was such a difference between how I acted outwardly and how I felt inside.”
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Interseksualiteit
“Intersex is that you are born with a body that is different from the image of man or woman as we learn it in biology,” explains Hendrickx. “A man has XY chromosomes and makes male hormones and a woman has XX chromosomes, female hormones and female genitals.” That’s how we learn it in biology, at least.
In practice, things sometimes go differently. Research shows that 1 in 200,000 births is intersex. There are many different forms of intersex. For example, a person may not have a uterus, but they may have testes and an external female genitalia. The result may also be that the gender on the outside resembles a vagina as well as a penis.
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Love relationships
Love relationships in particular were complicated for Hendrickx. If someone told her during a date that she was so nice, Hendrickx could hardly hear it.
“Just wait until you know what I really am,” she says. “I had to learn that this is something I have, next to all other things. I am also that Marleen who can just talk and dance well.”
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